pgt technology scouting

The company was founded April 2009, with focus on IT-related consulting, knowledge transfer and software development.

In this regard the company provides services in the areas of

technology scouting and coaching

training

technology spikes, prototyping, development bootstrapping

consulting and reviews

Where We Come From

The tag cloud around the company activities would probably enlist many of the successful technologies that emerged from the OSS movement and the Java macro cosmos.

Sets of technologies often donâ€™t fit together and architectural concepts are often undermined by bad technology decisions and by misunderstanding (and therefore misuse of) frameworks. Neither starting by choosing a technology stack, nor starting from an architecture blueprint targets the main problem that one wonâ€™t fit-up to the other â€“ unless it is taken care for it from the beginning.

The inhouse architect needs to have an indeep knowledge of company proceedings and product requirements. The need for overall and indeep technology knowledge is not part of the profile of many software architects.

Lost in Space?

It has become even harder to keep up with all new technologies in the java and java ee world. The clean distinction between rich clients and web clients is no more, architectural and semantic shifts happening everywhere.

Modern Java frameworks provide the foundation for the development of enterprise ready applications. Many of the OSS frameworks available today are the result of best practices on different layers of an application. The integration across layers is out of their scope, often left as â€žtodoâ€œ for the software architects or developers:

The main goal of technology scouting is to help to identify technologies that could fit into the architectural requirements. The technology scout does fill in the gap between the â€žnon technology knowingâ€œ architect and the â€žnon architecture respectingâ€œ developer.

Technology Spikes and Prototyping

Once the technology stack is setup, it is time for a proof of concept Â (POC). Â The integration of different frameworks requires indeep knowledge of the frameworks in question. This knowledge is not required on the day to day work, and thatâ€™s why an expert can help on a short term basis.

How do we integrate the frameworks

How do we achieve the defined architectural goals?

What are the imposed build infrastructure requirements?

This is where prototypes and technology spikes come into question.

The prototype is often only required as a proof of concept, can make use of mocked elements and mainly show that defined architecture goals and the technology stack play well together.

The technology spike is used to demonstrate the integration of the technologies and frameworks across all layers. It is used as a project bootstrap (iteration zero, spring zero) and will be used for the knowledge transfer. The technology spike can be used to ramp up the project from the one person team consisting of the technology scout to the full team size.